Speeches signify a revival
The 1980s was a grim decade in many of New Zealand’s smaller towns and cities and Patea in Taranaki was certainly among them. Mass unemployment followed the closure of the freezing works, the town’s main employer. One of the unexpected responses, which made Patea a household name all over the country in 1984, was the release of an enormously successful Ma¯ ori language pop song, Poi E.
A documentary described the Patea Ma¯ ori Club’s Poi E as our unofficial national anthem. It was the biggest-selling single in
New Zealand in 1984 and has reappeared in the charts in every decade since. The song was the brainchild of Dalvanius Prime, a talented and charismatic son of Patea who returned from a musical career in Australia and saw the depressed state of his hometown.
That backstory resurfaced in Parliament on Thursday when Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, one of the Ma¯ ori Party’s two new MPs, delivered her maiden speech. After she recalled the achievement of Prime, whom she called ‘‘one of our larger-than-life uncles’’, the public gallery broke into a rendition of Poi E.
That was a glorious moment, but there was a sadder edge. ‘‘Once again, we were being devastated by decisions being made in this House,’’ Ngarewa-Packer said about the economic depression of the 1980s. She had already talked about an earlier trauma, the invasion of Parihaka in 1881. Her great-grandfather, Hohepa Ngarewa Tumahuki, had narrowly survived the controversial imprisonment in Dunedin of Parihaka resisters.
Both Ngarewa-Packer’s speech and the one delivered by co-leader Rawiri Waititi showed how a once tired-looking political party had been dramatically revived. Their speeches were topical and urgent. Waititi’s win over Tamati Coffey in Waiariki was one of the great upsets of election night; NgarewaPacker coming in after special votes were counted was a bonus.
Waititi has already made it clear that he will present a challenge to the usual way of doing things, which will include challenging Pa¯ keha¯ sensibilities. Like Ngarewa-Packer, he had a story from 19th century history that was illustrative to him of the struggles of the present. His story was about Mokomoko, who was hanged for the murder in 1865 of the Rev Carl Volkner at O¯ potiki. Mokomoko claimed he was innocent and was eventually pardoned in 1992.
There are times when history is more apparent and immediate than at other times, and this is one of them. Pa¯ keha¯ New Zealanders often enjoy the luxury or even privilege of being able to believe the past has no direct bearing on the present. Ma¯ ori do not always have that luxury available to them, as the two speeches from
Their speeches were topical and urgent.
Parliament showed, and as has been demonstrated by Stuff’s Our Truth/Ta¯ Ma¯ tou Pono series this week.
But one must also be careful with the explosiveness of the rhetoric. Waititi’s equation of the noose that killed Mokomoko with the ‘‘colonial noose’’, or tie, he must wear in Parliament might be an acceptable if highly loaded metaphor, but most readers and viewers will have felt troubled by
Ngarewa-Packer’s claim to be ‘‘a descendant of a people who survived a holocaust, a genocide’’.
Two decades ago, former MPs Tariana Turia and Sandra Lee were both rightly criticised for describing the colonial subjugation and dispossession of Ma¯ ori as a holocaust, which is a word that must be reserved for the mass extermination of Jews and others by Nazi Germany. That is as true now as it was in 2000.